Elon Musk and my style of work
Elon Musk - The evil boss you must avoid. |
I push for 16 hour work week, with four-hour work days. I strongly feel that knowledge workers should have life, should spend time with their family and loved ones, think and reflect, should get new ideas. This I feel will cultivate a healthy brain and will ultimately increase productivity of the company.
What Elon Musk doing in Twitter looks very evil to me. For some reason even people of science and creativity, when they move to management, they become task masters without brains. They seem to forget where true productivity lies.
There are times when I finished coding for a sprint (2 weeks long one) in 2 hours, but yes all those other paper work does cost more time, but the core issue only takes two hours. There are times when even the sprint got over I haven’t started coding as the details were murky, or my understanding was not right. I understood a lot of things when I am away from keyboard, something works in your brains background while you enjoy life, all of a sudden most elegant solution pops up, and you implement it, and it works!
Somehow management people never seems to understand it, their view of knowledge work is like viewing a repetitive work in a factory. Humans are like automated robots to them. If a robot can drive 1000 bolts in an hour, then it must drive 4000 in four hours. In my view a human or biological system is not like that. We get tired, we get energized, we sometimes find work rewarding, and sometimes boring.
I am not worried about Twitters future, or its success or failure, I am long time user of Diaspora, I use Mastodon, and I have deleted my Facebook long ago. I am worried about the dangerous precedent Elon is setting in the I.T industry. With people like him, the industry will be populated by mindless ‘yes boss’ human bots who are there for a paycheck, than for the passion of coding.